The State of the PC

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Being technology writers, we tend to live in the present–and sometimes seem to be constantly living in the near-future. The tech press has recently been full of stories about quad-core desktop CPUs and Windows Vista, which no one actual can buy yet. As I write this, Windows Vista RC2 is downloading in the background. I’m sitting in my home office, getting download speeds in excess of 550KB per second (that’s kilo bytes per second.)

Some readers may remember the wonder they felt when U.S. Robotics—remember them?—shipped a modem that could move data at 19.2 kilo bits per second. That seemed unbelievably fast at the time. Of course, no one was downloading gigabyte-plus game demos in the day. People may remember when the original Doom game shipped on four floppy disks. Now, you can re-buy Doom for the Xbox 360 from Xbox Live Arcade in minutes.

The first PC I bought was a Compaq portable. The term “portable” here meant a computer you could physically carry around. Of course, it was the size of a small suitcase, had a built-in, 9-inch green CRT and weighed in excess of 30 pounds. Did I mention that it had two 360KB floppy drives? I ran WordStar on a clunky daisy wheel printer, and it felt like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Eventually, I added a ten megabyte (yes, megabyte—that’s not a typo) hard drive for over $600, and thought I had an infinite amount of storage.

Several years later, I picked up a generic system built with a 20MHz 386 CPU from Jade Computer. By that time, the PC had truly become generic, as more and more companies cloned the PC BIOS in the same manner as Compaq. In fact, companies like Phoenix and American Megatrends built clone BIOSes that would show up in a number of motherboards. AMI actually built their own motherboards for awhile.

Eventually, I started adding my own hardware, taking baby steps along the way to becoming a system builder. The event that took me down the path of building my own systems was, not surprisingly, a game—Falcon 3.0—an F-16 combat flight simulator. Falcon 3.0 had a “high fidelity flight model” that would only run if a 80387 floating-point coprocessor was present. Alas, the motherboard in the system I had bought lacked a socket for the 387. So I upgraded the Jade system with a Micronics motherboard, added a 33MHz 386 and a matching 387 coprocessor. It was like having my own supercomputer.

That’s enough of the trip down memory lane. The point here is that we’ve really come an incredibly long way in a decade. I began writing about technology back in the mid-nineties, writing for Computer Gaming World. Now even that venerable publication will soon cease to exist, morphing into the new Ziff-Davis pub, Games for Windows: the Official Magazine.

As the Internet took hold, print publications got thinner and had to evolve their focus. More and more, current technology information can be found on the web. Of course, the web is a tricky beast, often full of conflicting and inaccurate information. But the cool thing is that everyone can participate. Simple publication tools, like blogging software, enables anyone with some knowledge or opinions to make their presence felt on the web.

But perspective is a funny thing. You can look back and feel like you’ve come a long way. The pace of change seems to be relentlessly accelerating, and the future seems to be rushing at us like an express train, but it never quite seems to arrive. These days, stuff arrives so rapidly that we’re always waiting for the next thing.

Inevitably, though, the next thing becomes mainstream. I’m often surprised when I talk to relentlessly average users. I don’t mean they’re average people, but rather, they have lives outside of following the latest tech trends. For them, tech is a tool or a way to do something new or different that makes their lives better. But the way the culture is evolving is fascinating. At an arena concert not long ago, I was bemused to see people raise open cellphones to light up the darkness, rather than lift candles, matches or lighters. Tech changes life in unexpected ways, sometimes small, sometimes not.

So I keep looking forward to the future, which never seems to be quite what I expect. It’s more fun that way.

This Week on ExtremeTechThis is the week of Fall Processor Forum, so we’ll have an update midweek of the latest in the CPU world. We also take a look at an interesting external hard drive that offers eSATA and both USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 ports—all it lacks is gigabit Ethernet! Jason Cross has been playing around with the Vista sidebar, and compares Vista sidebar gadgets with Yahoo widgets—how useful are they, really?

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